Almost half of all children born last year will see their parents split up by
the time they are 15, research suggests.

The parents of 354,000 of the 729,674 babies born in England and Wales in 2012 will no longer be together by the time they reach their late teens, figures from the Marriage Foundation indicate.

A report by the think tank also argues that married couples are far more likely to remain together than those who have children out of wedlock.

Only five per cent of children whose parents will still be together by the time they reach their mid-teens will have an unmarried mother and father, it predicts.

Harry Benson, of the Marriage Foundation, told the Daily Mail: “We continually hear about divorce rates shooting up and causing the exponential rise in family breakdown, but this is demonstrably not the case.

“The percentage of marriages ending in divorce has actually fallen since 2005 to 42%. For all marriages lasting over ten years, the divorce rate has barely changed since the 1960s.